Historian's Prizewinning Book on Guns Is Embroiled in a Scandal

By ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: December 8, 2001

Only a year ago, Michael A. Bellesiles was well on his way to becoming an academic superstar. He had just published a book with a startling thesis: very few people owned working guns in colonial America. Stepping into the ferocious national debate over guns and the meaning of the Second Amendment, Mr. Bellesiles, a history professor at Emory University in Atlanta, caused a sensation. Legal scholars said his prize-winning book could influence federal court cases challenging gun laws; gun-control advocates championed the research as proof that America's gun culture is, as Mr. Bellesiles put it, "an invented tradition"; angry gun owners saw it as an insidious attack, a calculated effort to prove that the Constitution's framers could not have intended the "right to bear arms" to apply to individuals if so few people owned them.

Now many of Mr. Bellesiles's defenders have gone silent. Over the past year a number of scholars who have examined his sources say he has seriously misused historical records and possibly fabricated them. They say the outcome, when all the evidence is in, could be one of the worst academic scandals in years.

Mr. Bellesiles (pronounced buh-LEEL) has denied that the errors in "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" are more serious than the ones found in any lengthy and serious work of scholarship, and he has repeatedly said the attacks against him are politically motivated. Mr. Bellesiles, who owns five guns and likes to shoot skeet and target-shoot in his spare time, said he never intended his book to become a cause célèbre for gun control advocates. "When I saw that the flap copy said, 'This is the N.R.A.'s worst nightmare,' I was horrified," he said. "I feel like I'm a historian who accidentally stepped into a minefield."

Indeed, after the National Rifle Association alerted its members about the book, Mr. Bellesiles said, he began receiving hate mail and threats by phone, e-mail, fax and letter. He was forced to get an unlisted number and to change his e-mail address, he said. Earlier this year, two American historical societies passed special resolutions condemning the harassment.

Without doubt, Mr. Bellesiles's research would not have received such careful scrutiny if he had not stepped into the politically and ideologically charged struggle over guns. Yet the scholars who have documented serious errors in Mr. Bellesiles's book — many of them gun-control advocates — do not appear to have any sort of political agenda.

They were struck by his claim to have studied more than 11,000 probate records in 40 counties around the country. He found that between 1765 and 1790, only 14 percent of estate inventories listed guns, and "over half (53 percent) of these guns were listed as broken or otherwise defective." Those claims are featured prominently in the book and were cited in many positive reviews as the core of its argument.

But those who tried to examine the research soon found that they could not, because most of Mr. Bellesiles's records, he said, had been destroyed in a flood. The records they could check showed an astonishing number of serious errors, almost all of them seemingly intended to support his thesis. In some cases his numbers were off by a factor of two, three or more, said Randolph Roth, a history professor at Ohio State University.

To use one example: in his book, Mr. Bellesiles writes that of 186 probate inventories from Providence, R.I., recorded between 1680 and 1730, "all for property-owning adult males," only 90 mention some form of gun, and more than half the guns were "evaluated as old and of poor quality."

At least three scholars have independently examined the same archive and found that 17 of the estates in question were owned by women; that some estates lacked inventories, and that of those that had them, a much higher percentage than Mr. Bellesiles reported contained guns; and that only 9 percent of the guns were evaluated as old and of poor quality.

"The number and scope of the errors in Bellesiles's work are extraordinary," Mr. Roth said. They go well beyond the probate record data, he added, affecting Mr. Bellesiles's interpretation of militia returns, literary documents and many other sources.

Confronted with serious errors in his research, Mr. Bellesiles has acknowledged that there are problems with the way he used probate record data, and he even made some changes in the paperback edition that came out earlier this year. But he said that the data were only a small part of the book. "I wish I had taken them out entirely," he said.

Jack Rakove, a Stanford University historian who has been supportive of "Arming America," agreed: "The book raises a host of interesting questions about the role firearms have played in American life and culture, and it goes well beyond the probate data."

But Mr. Rakove conceded that he had not looked at the research that has been questioned, and he said it was important that Mr. Bellesiles respond to his critics more fully than he has so far.